Study the stuff you like? Sorry I’m an art student, the purpose of higher education seems to be to take something really fun you love doing and MAKE YOU DESPISE IT WITH A FIReY ANGER HOTTER THAN A THOUSAND SUNS. :p just kidding

Never understood the mindset of people who think learning ends at a certain age.

Maybe being homeschooled had something to do with that. Maybe not — my brothers have different mindsets — but it seems to me (as an outsider) that the chief result of public school is to so scar children that the majority of them see school as a chore you have to get through until you escape, while a significant minority see it as a torment you might not survive.

I wonder how many actually see it as a place where you engage in learning new facts and new ways of thinking, with teachers who care about you, classmates who work with you instead of against you, and an overall environment that portrays the gathering of knowledge (and how pieces of knowledge fit together) as a lifelong pleasure?

I left school and continued with an education in classical literature, the arts, and history. It’s not that hard to continue with an education with the resources that have always been available to us. Libraries, Museums, Theater. Depending on what you want to do there is countless resources.

Mind you, I have no degree and I directed myself for my own personal edification. But I’ve always been a fan of history and the arts so I just went all in for pleasure.

I know it’s not at all difficult to do, especially given the resources available nowadays. I once decided at 2 AM that I had never tasted a particular fairground treat (funnel cakes I think it was), and by 3 AM was tasting them for the first time after easily finding the recipe online. This is UNPRECEDENTED access to information.

The question is whether kids who go through public school tend to come out of it with the MINDSET of wanting to continue learning. And it’s my experience — limited experience, to be sure, but also backed up by the attitudes out countless characters in the media, the way news does certain school-related stories, and anecdotes on sites like this — that kids who have the mindset to continue learning are sadly rare.

Once was waiting for a bus when a woman questioned me about the book I was reading. She flat-out could not comprehend the idea that I would be reading it for a reason other than because school required it, or because work required it. In her mind, there was no other reason you would EVER study a subject on your own.

Yeah.. if you have a passion for learning when your done with k-12 school its in spite of the system, not because of it. That being said I had a few teachers who were a genuine benefit and nurtured me to grow as much as I could, but they were an exception, and in a significant portion of the cases it was more the system holding the teachers back than the teachers not being good enough.

This is all very true. I remember an episode of the old XMen cartoon where Beast was reading Animal Farm and the Friends of Humanity were making fun of him. It was to show that they were arrogant and stupid, but sadly that attitude is much too common.

Frankly I always enjoyed learning as a kid, just without the restrictions of school limitations. Still do in fact. School restricts partly to avoid the sketchier parts of the subjects at hand and also simply because now you just teach to the test which I think is unfortunate. It’s not about bolstering a love of learning, but just get the kids in and out of the system and into a 9-5 thankless job so they can pay their taxes like good little robots.

Actually, I can attribute to X-Men even further back at least one book I wouldn’t even have heard of had it not been for the comic book (way before the animated series; I’m old). A miniseries with Colossus’ little sister led me to one of my favorite Russian novels to this day!

(And for those playing along at home: had my baby. Home recovering with my boy. He’s biiiig. Woo.)

The first major depressive episode I had, the first time I wanted to kill myself, started when I was 12 as a direct result of the school I was in. My second major depressive episode happened as a result of college, which I was forced to attend and ended up dropping out of.

I’ll keep learning. The internet is a FANTASTIC source of learning. Just this week I decided I wanted to start an ant farm, with absolutely no practical knowledge of ants whatsoever. Now, I have a queen ant I found in a freshly-dug claustral chamber, probably only days from her nuptial flight, sitting nice and cozy in my new formicarium preparing for her first nanitics. Look at all that ant jargon I understand now! Did you know that all worker ants are female? You do now!

But, when it comes to standardised, licensed, state-approved learning… I basically consider it to be a threat to my health and continued existence on this earth.

School often feels like a job that gives you homework and no paycheck. Even if Selkie and Amanda attended the best primary school in the world, which we know they don’t, they’re young enough that they’d see it as a thing adults make them do that they won’t have to do someday. So, I guess to answer your question, I think that it’s partly the good points everyone has made about the limitations of school, and partly the lack of agency plus limited understanding of responsibilities associated with being a kid. It doesn’t even necessarily have to do with learning (though it sometimes does, as you’ve seen with people who don’t understand reading certain books for pleasure), it just has to do with School.

I was actually homeschooled for a year (grade 1), and that period of time was one of the best in my entire life. I can not ever remember being as happy as I was during that year. And what makes that astounding is, THAT WAS THE YEAR MY PARENTS GOT DIVORCED. During a time where most kids would have been going through MAJOR emotional upheaval, even though I missed my dad I was the happiest I had ever been or ever would be.

I completely believe that homeschooled kids end up smarter, more well-adjusted, and hungrier for knowledge than the rest of us. I can only dream of what my life would be like right now if middle school had happened at home. I would be significantly more sane.

The internet has taught me more important things than school could ever hope to. I have learned science, math, language, history, art, and so much more from the internet. From school, I learned that I am worthless, that I don’t matter, that nobody cares, and that the only thing that I could ever hope to do to change the world for the better would be to die. That is, if anyone even noticed I was gone.

Glad you know better now. It’s horrible that school would make any kid feel like that.

Yeah, it’s difficult to judge what school vs. homeschool would be for any specific student, but statistically, homeschoolers score better on just about everything. That include school subjects (math, English, science, etc.), getting along with people (especially grownups), holding down jobs (which has a lot to do with that last point*), initiative and inventiveness, creativity, all that stuff.

*The number-one reason people can’t keep a job, across all types of jobs, is “Can’t get along with people.” Whether that’s customers, coworkers, or bosses, it’s a major problem if you can’t manage it.

Oh, and the slight problem with comparing school kids to homeschooled kids is: Homeschooling is inherently a self-selection bias problem. You’re looking at a group of kids whose parents cared enough, and had enough time and resources, to raise them at home. That necessarily puts the results higher than if you just took every kid out of school and forced the parents to teach their own.

Because a lot of parents don’t care enough to try to do it right, and of those parents who do care enough, a lot of them lack the time, energy, resources, and/or knowledge to manage it.

And temperament. Don’t forget temperament. Might have time, energy, resources, and knowledge, but if you go batty after trying to deal with a kid 24/7… It may not end well. (Introvert parent, extrovert child.)

On the other hand, by high school, there are online classes, too, for kids who are able to be self-motivated in that regard. A good resource, if one has a computer.

Eh, when you’re such a young kid its pretty standard really. You know that school has a finite end point and then you go to work, and thats not learning anymore because its not school. Lots of assumptions we make when young are oversimplifications or wrong, but based on the best information we have at the time and our limited ability to frame it within our current world view.

Actually, Selkie, you can stop at 18-19. Unless you really really want a rather useless piece of paper that cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars to get. Or, alternatively, you can get a piece of paper that is actually worth something, but will be more than twice the cost and require you to keep going to school into your thirties…

Frankly, you’re better off ending it at 19, and then go out and actually learn something that also pays you for doing it.

Seeing the number of people now making their livings from internet content — whether that’s making videos on YouTube, making webcomics, blogging, educating, compiling research and making it better available to all, etc. — where the CONTENT is free but the Content Creator’s living comes from some combination of ad revenue, print-on-demand merch, and patrons (Patreon and such), I have been wondering how long it’s going to take to get to a state where it’s just as plausible to start earning a wage in high school by making content as to make it through high school and get a regular job.

If you’re a Maker, you can find an audience, and that’s something that used to take years of training and was an extremely iffy profession, but nowadays you can start when you’re not even ten, with minimal actual training, develop an audience through personality or other factors, and — while certainly not guaranteed — is far more of a reasonable choice than even twenty years ago. Or you can start creating alongside a part-time job and end up bringing in enough income to either continue part-time (never getting a regular full-time job, never bothering with the corporate ladder etc.) or to eschew the job entirely.

Not useless for me, I’m on the track of being a college professor. Sure it can seem like a useless piece of paper if you’re not in love with what you do, but if what you have isn’t philosophy you’ll be able to find a job in what you do.

Funny my “useless” piece of paper is what got my all three of my jobs post college. Maybe yours was useless to you, but that doesn’t make it universally true. There are a lot of industries where a college degree is necessary.

College degrees are so important nowadays because a high school diploma is no longer any guarantee that you are literate or can do basic arithmetic. Skip college and you have to find some other way of proving to employers that you have learned what my father learned by the 8th grade in a two-room rural schoolhouse.

I’m not sure what you mean by “going to school into your thirties”. Even a PHD shouldn’t take more than 8 years, and most PHD’s are useful only as a “union card” for college professors and some government jobs. Doctors’ training, including internship, can run into your thirties, especially if like one of my friends you had to take a few years off to earn enough money for premed and medical school. Lawyers should need about 8 years and finish at 26 or 27 – a 4 year degree, 3 years law school, and then study independently for the bar exam because even with all the time and money required for law school they don’t teach specific state laws. It only runs into your thirties if you repeatedly failed the bar exam…

I’m an electrical engineer with a bachelors degree, and I’ve worked steadily at a good but not great salary for over 30 years. If you are good at math, know how to handle tools, and don’t mind working very hard I’d recommend a BS in some engineering field – but no more. Handling tools is important – it means you can’t be replaced by someone in India working over the internet. (You can be replaced by that guy on an H1B visa – but he needs a large enough salary for the American cost of living, and the employer has to guess their manpower needs a year ahead and do mounds of paperwork. Big corporations might do that. I concentrate on small companies.)

An engineering PHD theoretically can be completed in 7 years, but that requires a very heavy work load. It’s quite common to need 5 years for the BS degree, and that’s after 2/3 of the entrants have been flushed out by first-year classes that require 4-6 hours of homework for each hour of lecture. Still, you ought to be through long before you are thirty. But unless you’re very talented and very focused on a particular area of research, or want to be a professor, graduate degrees in engineering are often counterproductive. You’re too specialized and rate too high a payscale, so matching jobs are few; you spend a long time finding the right job, and in a few years your employer’s requirements change and you’re out of work for six months or a year.

A Bachelor’s is utterly useless, that it what I was referring to. If you don’t have a Masters or better, it means nothing for employment. As for a PhD, I’m the son of a PhD holder. It did take her to her 30s. Perhaps you can get one sooner, but life requires too much effort for most to commit to that scale of work.

And so far, the folks who seem to contradict me are toolmen. Engineers. What got you your jobs and let you keep them is you ability with tools. That’s not something college is needed for, you can pick that up just about anywhere and do well enough. So you spent a lot of money on paper that didn’t actually get you your jobs. I’m not lessening your skills, being handy is always valued. But the source is off.

Ultimately it depends on the major. Some majors benefit from a Masters, some a PhD, and some, you’re just better off going to a trade school.

The owner of a Butcher Shop for instance can make some really good money but he’s better off going to a trade school for just a few years than going to a school and getting a Masters. (Besides, there’s not much to it, what’s he going to do? Study the theory of meat?) Essentially you need to tailor your schooling to what you want to do for the rest of your life. Sometimes that means college, sometimes that means trade school, and other times that just means picking up practical experience.

Again, your experience may be true for you, but it is not universally true, and the statement that a “Bachelors is useless” is proveably false.

Many industries, medical (non-doctor track), software, various types of engineering, education, etc. require a Bachelors degree and for good reason, a high school education is insufficient for the requirements of the job, a standard college education however is sufficient. Certainly one can advance further with a higher degree, but honestly having worked in the software industry, beyond a few specialized fields, the education you get in school is what you need to get started and from there practical experience is more valuable. But there is a reason that people who supposedly learned the skills but don’t have the education have a much harder time getting these jobs, because there is more to it than simply being able to write a program and a college education teaches many of them (like team work, working to deadlines, etc.).

When having to choose between a raft of candidates, having a bachelors degree is a reliable minimum bar to hold them too, because assuming tehy come from a reputable school you know it means they have demonstrated a basic competency. You can further refine it based on more information, but it makes a large amount of practical sense to filter first based on that. You can try to get a job in the software industry without a degree, but the bar is going to be set much much higher because there is no obvious criteria to use to demonstrate you are minimally competent. Recruiters and hiring managers don’t have the time to dig deep in to everyones individual background to start narrowing down hiring choices. A bachelors degree is valuable both for the individual because of the training they receive and the potential hirer because of the information it provides.

This is why being born into a trade family or born into Royalty is such a boon, by the time you’re 18, you’ve learned your trade, or are ready to rule your roost: I prefer Harry over Charles. In These-here parts y’all can drop outta school at 16 and be lookin’ fer work the rest o’ yer life. And you cannot count on marrying a Prince, anymore. For every Wallace Simpson, there are thousands of girls who will go to bed Prince-less. Work-in’ 9 to 5 it’s no way to make a livin’, Workin’ 9 to 5,…

Hey Dave I’ve been encountering a few scam redirect ads on my iPhone the last couple of days when coming to the site. They don’t happen 100% of the time but it is often enough to warrant letting you know about it.

I think the two can’t even be compared. For one you get paid! Then there is no home work or studying for tests, once my work shift ends that’s it, I don’t need to give a crap about my job until the next one starts. Plus rather than being at the mercy of the professors and having to take any bs from them, I can quit any time and look for a different job.

I was rocking a ‘stache at 16. Mind you, it looked like crap because I was a dumb teen, but I got my peach fuzz in at 13 and by the time I was 16 I had full facial hair. And Gillette kept sending me razors in the mail. I thought one of the people working for them was stalking me.

I was rocking a ‘stache at 16. Mind you, it looked like crap because I was a dumb teen, but I got my peach fuzz in at 13 and by the time I was 16 I had full facial hair. And Gillette kept sending me razors in the mail. I thought one of the people working for them was stalking me.